County CEO Frank Kim set to retire this week, still no success in finding his replacement

• July 6, 2024

Frank Kim is wrapping up the last week of his nine years as Orange County’s CEO, having shepherded the administration during a global pandemic, a homelessness crisis and major construction. But with his last day arriving, the OC Board of Supervisors has still not picked a permanent replacement.

Kim said his 29 years total working for the county have taught him that local government is the backbone on which Orange County residents and businesses thrive.

“When I think about the county, we run the library system, we run all the regional parks. We have beaches that people enjoy. We help build the streets,” Kim said. “People, I think, don’t think about who does it. They just know that it’s done and they have a super high expectation.”

Kim gave notice of his pending retirement in late November, but supervisors can’t reach a consensus on who will replace him and manage the county’s $9.5 billion budget, along with its more than 18,000 employees.

“My hope is that we continue to work with the candidates and see if the board can come to some understanding because Frank Kim is now going to be gone and there aren’t many options left to us,” Second District Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento said. “We have so many other priorities that we need to take care of.”

Third District Supervisor Don Wagner, who was part of an ad-hoc committee with Fifth District Supervisor Katrina Foley to find candidates to bring to the full board, said one of the reasons the hunt for Kim’s replacement is proving “very difficult,” is the next CEO has big shoes to fill.

“Roughly 20 candidates were looked at by the ad-hoc committee as potentials, some seriously good candidates,” he said. “We narrowed it down to six, interviewed the six, narrowed it down to three for the board as a whole to talk to. And the board liked all three of them for different reasons in different ways, and decided … let’s talk to all six.”

Wagner said he can see any of the candidates, each with unique strengths and weaknesses, being the next CEO. But while a number of candidates have been able to muster three votes, he said none have been able to garner support from the full five-supervisor board.

“One of the weaknesses is that they’re not Frank Kim. They don’t have that institutional knowledge. That provides us with a challenge,” Wagner said.

Fourth District Supervisor Doug Chaffee said Kim’s background, not only as CEO but in his several previous county positions including in finance, has made the hunt for his successor difficult.

“We had a national search, which took some time. I’m not certain that we got a perfectly good pool of candidates under that, so we’ve been looking at some additional people,” Chaffee said. “I have a candidate that I like, I think would do a good job. We all want to do the best for the county, but we’ve not reached an agreement.”

Wagner, who is chair of the Board of Supervisors, said the county’s chief financial officer, Michelle Aguirre, will step in as interim CEO until the board makes a hire.

Kim was tapped to be the top executive of the county in 2015. In August 2022, he agreed to extend his contract through May 2025, but now Kim says he wants to focus on his personal life outside of government and the public eye – you know, clean the garage, mow the lawn, relax.

Addressing homelessness

Kim said the thing he looks back on with the most pride is developing the county’s homeless system of care.

Soon after he stepped in as chief executive, a crisis began unfolding as a large encampment grew along the Santa Ana riverbed, forcing cities and the county to look at how they were addressing homelessness.

“When I first came in, most counties, including Orange, didn’t have a developed system of care,” Kim said. What followed, he said, was “building out our outreach team, developing a structure and a system for how we engage with homeless people where they’re at.”

The county also developed two shelters, adding hundreds of beds to the local supply, as well as worked with nonprofits and cities to streamline access to resources, including mental health and substance use services.

Still, more than 7,300 people reported being without permanent shelter in January when the county took a required point-in-time count – up 28% from the previous survey two years prior.

County officials attributed the stark increase to the loss of pandemic-era resources in place in 2022 that were keeping more people off the streets. (The count still showed a 7% increase in people experiencing homelessness from 2019 to 2024.)

Kim said he doesn’t put much emphasis on the biennial count because it doesn’t show the full picture of homelessness in Orange County. Evaluating the full system of care is more telling of what needs are or aren’t being addressed when it comes to the homeless community, he said.

He is proud of working with cities to build mental health facilities, shelters and affordable housing projects, but said there is still more work to be done.

“When I think about homelessness, you have to give them help. I also think that there has to be consequences,” he said. “I think our community, our society and the state, they’re at the beginning of thinking through what laws and what services, and what mix of laws and services, provide that bookend of help, but also of consequence.”

“We have to help them with their drug use,” he said, but added, “We have to make sure that if they’re committing crimes, that they’re held accountable.

“And so there’s a balance and it doesn’t feel balanced today.”

He also said there remains the need for more buy-in.

“Addressing how to serve the homeless people in the communities that they live in is challenging because most communities don’t want the homeless in and around their community. They want you to help them, but just help them somewhere else,” Kim said. “That’s how we built the service planning area model, saying every region, we would ideally like them to have a shelter, a location where they can connect to services, treatment programs so that they’re connected within their general community.”

Upgrading infrastructure

Another career highlight, Kim said, is the newly opened Civic Center.

Under Kim’s leadership, the county followed through with a $400 million project to build the present-day county headquarters in Santa Ana.

The idea, he said, was to bring in all county departments and create a “one-stop-shop” for residents. Currently, the buildings house the county’s administrative and public health offices, a larger public meeting room and a service center where residents can get copies of important documents, apply for permits and more.

Still to come, he said, is to bring over the district attorney and social services departments.

“People think, great, you spend all this money, you’re just building ivory towers for government employees. No, it’s more than that. We’re bringing a lot of our county departments into the Civic Center because before they were leasing space,” Kim said. “Yes, we had to invest in it, but long term, we’re going to save money because we’re not paying leases forever. We own these buildings and then all the departments are coming in.”

In 2018, the county’s new $35 million, 30,000-square-foot animal shelter opened in Tustin, replacing an increasingly inadequate facility that dated back to the 1940s.

It’s another facility Kim is proud to have been part of bringing online; significantly larger, it provided proper surgical suites, air-conditioned kennels, play areas and more.

But animal advocates have begun to criticize the county’s shelter system again, post pandemic, arguing its hours aren’t conducive to getting the most animals adopted out, there are chronic staffing shortages and its policies lead to too many euthanized animals and overpopulation problems.

“I know we still take a lot of criticism from many of the community members about the condition of animal care, but I generally disagree with them. When I look at the condition of animal care and I look at the individual issues that people bring up, I’m confident that the staff is handling it the right way,” Kim said. “They would want us to be perfect. I would like us to be perfect. Perfection is difficult, and we’re working toward being better always.”

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Navigating the pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic was a challenge, Kim said, but one that he now thinks has helped the county foster better public health decisions.

“When I think about the COVID experience, we all struggled with the various health orders that came down from the state and advice from the federal government,” Kim said. “It was difficult. But the one good thing that came from it is that we understood we had an opportunity to really learn how a large-scale public health disaster affects county residents and businesses.”

But the county’s response was not perfect, he said, and looking back he wishes services were set up more quickly for community members, especially those most at-risk.

“We acted with the best intent, but hindsight is always more accurate,” Kim said. “We could have gotten the testing stations up faster. We could have put the vaccine centers up faster.”

A week sooner here and there, he said. “You always have regrets over stuff like that.”

With COVID-19 came an influx of state and federal rescue funding.

In 2021, the five supervisor districts were each allocated $10 million in federal relief money and another $3 million in general funds to spend in the local communities.

“So the board members had a discussion in public. They said, ‘Every one of our districts is different. We represent our districts, so to address the concerns of our district, either in supporting businesses, restaurants … we would like some of that funding so that we can direct how it’s allocated,’” Kim said.

Last year, questions were raised about the policies surrounding the districts’ discretionary funds and $6.2 million that First District Supervisor Andrew Do directed to a small nonprofit, Viet America Society, after it became public his daughter has been listed at times as a leader of the organization.

Though Do was not legally required to disclose the family connection, it prompted Sarmiento to lobby (ultimately unsuccessfully) for rules that would make it so when any immediate family member is involved in the organization receiving discretionary funds.

Government code, Kim said, gives the publicly elected Board of Supervisors the power to appropriate and spend public tax dollars.

“Do I worry about the board members implementing district funds again in the future? I think to be very candid, it is their authority,” Kim said. “I’m not elected by the people to direct how tax dollars are spent. I make recommendations, but it is their authority.”

Looking ahead for OC

Kim said the county’s next CEO faces a handful of pressing issues to address when they take the seat.

There are changes coming with the Mental Health Services Act, which directs hundreds of millions of dollars to the county for behavioral health programs, but is going to start requiring more of the funding to go to housing.

And there’s pressure in general from the state to build more housing, he said.

“We are working with the state to identify the best way for a county that looks like Orange, which is a very high-density community, to be able to incorporate the number of affordable housing units that they’re asking for in a way that doesn’t lose the character that makes Orange County such a wonderful place to live and work,” Kim said.

“We agree that we do need to build more affordable housing units. And we’re doing it as fast as possible. It’s just a challenge because of the density of the county,” he said.

But the job of local government is to keep the ball rolling, Kim said. “That’s a lot of what we do here in the county, we have lots of projects, and you’re just trying to advance them every day.”

Kim is not involved in the hiring process for his replacement, but he says the supervisors are looking at a strong pool of candidates.

“The only advice that I gave the board is that they should look for somebody who can serve the diverse interests of the board. Somebody who is fair, who is apolitical, who will administer the county responsibly,” Kim said.

“It’s been a really good 29 years. I’m really proud of the work that I’ve done here,” he said. “I’m proud of my coworkers. I think every CEO that’s been in has made the county a little bit better.

“I’m happy to leave my mark and make it a little bit better than it was when I came in.”

​ Orange County Register 

Disneyland sells out of Oogie Boogie Bash tickets in 11 days

• July 6, 2024

Disneyland annual passholders snapped up pre-sale tickets quickly to attend Oogie Boogie Bash while the remaining sales moved a lot slower than in past years as the fever pitch surrounding the ticket launch cooled considerably for the wildly popular Halloween event.

Disneyland sold out of Oogie Boogie Bash 2024 tickets by 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, July 6 after three separate on-sale events for annual passholders and the general public, according to the Disneyland website.

ALSO SEE: Why Disneyland’s Oogie Boogie Bash took so long to sell out

Oogie Boogie Bash 2024 will run on 27 select nights from Aug. 25 through Oct. 31 at Disney California Adventure.

Oogie Boogie Bash pre-sale tickets that went on sale June 25 for Inspire Keyholders sold out in three hours.

All other Disneyland Magic Keyholders got their chance on June 26 and grabbed all the available tickets in just over two hours.

ALSO SEE: Disneyland starts Halloween 2024 earlier than ever before

The general public took nine days to purchase the remaining Oogie Boogie Bash tickets that went on sale on June 27.

Disneyland updated its tech to avoid issues that plagued past sales, make purchases flow more efficiently and process more transactions per minute, according to News Nation reporter Scott Gustin.

ALSO SEE: Disneyland to close Space Mountain during busy summer season

This year’s 11-day sell out was considerably slower than the 12 hours it took last year when the ticket launch took place on a single “nightmare” day. In 2022, tickets sold out in less than a week.

This year, wait times were non-existent after the initial rush of online buyers slowed down following the general public sales launch. Sunday and Thursday night tickets went first with the Tuesday night dates the last to go.

Tickets for Oogie Boogie Bash 2024 cost $134 to $189 depending on the date.

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This year’s edition of Oogie Boogie Bash will include familiar nighttime entertainment like the Frightfully Fun Parade and Villains Grove along with trick-or-treat trails. Character costumes, food and merchandise typically have a seasonal flair.

The Oogie Boogie Bash after-hours party is separate from the Halloween Time decor that takes over the parks during the All Hallow’s Eve season. The 5-hour after-party starts at 6 p.m. with mix-in beginning three hours earlier.

All the Halloween attraction overlays you’ve known from seasons past will be back — including Guardians of the Galaxy — Mission: Breakout, Mater’s Junkyard Jamboree and Luigi’s Rollickin’ Roadsters.

​ Orange County Register 

Wimbledon: No. 1 Iga Swiatek falls apart in third round

• July 6, 2024

LONDON — No. 1-ranked Iga Swiatek again faltered at Wimbledon, losing in the third round to Yulia Putintseva 3-6, 6-1, 6-2 on Saturday.

The result ended a 21-match winning streak for Swiatek. She is a five-time Grand Slam champion, including four titles on the red clay at the French Open — most recently last month — and one on the hard courts at the U.S. Open.

The All England Club’s grass has always given her the most trouble as a pro at any major tournament, although the 23-year-old from Poland did win the junior trophy as a teenager.

Swiatek has only once been as far as the quarterfinals at Wimbledon; that was last year, when she lost at that stage. In 2022, her 37-match unbeaten run ended with a third-round loss to Alize Cornet at the All England Club.

Swiatek has talked about looking forward to improving on grass, but she decided to withdraw last month from the only tuneup event that was originally on her schedule before Wimbledon.

The 35th-ranked Putintseva now has an eight-match run of her own, all on grass, including a title at Birmingham before arriving in London. Still, this is the first time in 10 appearances at Wimbledon that the 29-year-old from Kazakhstan made it past the second round.

Her best showing at any Slam was getting to the quarterfinals at the French Open twice and U.S. Open once.

This result also was unexpected because Swiatek not only won all four previous meetings against Putintseva, but also claimed every set they had played.

Asked during a postmatch interview on No. 1 Court how she managed to emerge with the victory, the often-animated Putintseva replied: “I don’t know. Really, I don’t.”

Well, here is at least one key part of what happened: Swiatek looked very little like someone who has led the WTA rankings for nearly every week since April 2022 and is assured of remaining there no matter what happens the rest of the way at Wimbledon.

She kept making mistakes, particularly over the last two sets, when Putintseva did not even try to put balls away and instead was happy to allow Swiatek to help her.

When Putintseva was building a 4-0 lead in the last set by grabbing 16 of its first 19 points, she only needed to produce two winners. That’s because her other 14 points were all gained thanks to either unforced errors (seven) or forced errors (seven) off Swiatek’s racket.

After one miss into the net, Swiatek muttered to herself. After another point went awry, she placed her hand over her mouth. Generally, she looked as flustered as she ever does during a match. By the end, she had accumulated 38 unforced errors, more than twice as many as her opponent’s 15.

​ Orange County Register 

Why these plants might be robust possibilities for a shade garden

• July 6, 2024

Each member of the Acanthus family of plants (Acanthaceaae) has a unique style that makes it hard to forget. 

Acanthus comes from the Greek word for thorn but most of the plants in question are hardly thorny. The family name is taken from Acanthus (one of its genera), some of whose species have spiny leaves. 

Yet the most commonly encountered Acanthus ornamental is bear’s breech, whose Latin name of Acanthus mollis literally means “soft thorns,” in reference to the fact that its deeply lobed leaves — while technically prickly — have the softest prickles imaginable. The ancient Greeks considered Acanthus leaves, reaching two feet in length while deeply lobed and crisply cut, to be the most ornamental in the plant kingdom and carved them into the tops of Corinthian columns. 

If you are looking for a background plant for a shade garden, Acanthus mollie is the one to choose since it reaches a height of five feet. Leaves are the lushest emerald green and the plant spreads thanks to its tuberous roots. These roots allow it to withstand long periods of drought where all the leaves may die back but the moment it is given water, it speedily returns to its former leafy beauty. It also sends up spikes up to four feet tall featuring white flowers hooded by protective bracts that have hints of purple, pink, green, and gray. 

Bush violet (Barleria obtusa) is a robust shrub in the Acanthus family that grows three feet tall by five feet wide. It may expand its reach considerably due to the fact that wherever its stems touch the ground, they take root. Masses of violet blooms that attract birds, bees, and butterflies appear on stem ends in fall and winter. Firecracker plant (Dicliptera squarrosa/suberecta) has fiery orange-red blooms and fuzzy gray foliage, growing two feet tall by three feet wide. This plant is extremely drought-tolerant and is at the very top of the list of plants that attract hummingbirds. Ribbon bush (Hypoestes aristata) flowers magnificently and abundantly in fall and winter, showing off lavender-pink blooms so numerous that its foliage is virtually hidden. All of the above can be found at nurseries supplied by San Marcos Growers (smgrowers.com).

There are several distinctive indoor plants in the Acanthus family. Aphelandra squarrosa has large yellow flowers and leaves with fluorescent white veins. Fittonia, known as the nerve plant, has smaller leaves with finer white veins. Both Pseuderanthemum atropurpureum var.Tricolor and Hemigraphis alternata sport foliage that is displayed in various combinations of pink, cream and purple. Finally, the polka dot plant (Hypoestes phyllostachya) has green leaves with white, pink, or red dots and splotches.

Here, I must confess my inspiration for writing about the Acanthus family of plants came from an email I received from Matthew Hunt, who gardens in San Clemente, and regaled his Mexican petunia (Ruellia brittoniana) experience. Mexican petunia is a distinguished member of the Acanthus family. The scientific name of Ruellia honors a 16th-century French physician-horticulturist named Jean Ruelle. 

Mexican petunia grows in sunny to partial shade exposures — flowering more in the sun — and is tolerant of a wide range of soil conditions, from dry to boggy. So if you have a pond and want something to plant on the wet ground around it, choose Mexican petunia. Yet if you have a garden that you never water more than twice a week – even in the hottest weather – you can plant it there too, as well as in containers.

Unrelated to the true petunia, Mexican petunia’s gramophone-shaped lavender-blue flowers suggest affinity with the petunia species. This is truly a delightful plant owing to its carefree growth habit and prolific flowering throughout the summer and fall. It grows in clumps that are three feet tall and half as wide but will increase its girth vegetatively, especially when soil is kept moist, through underground root-thickenings known as rhizomes. It will also expand its garden presence through self-sowing. Finally, its semi-succulent stems are an invitation to propagate it in the simplest possible way. Take six to eight-inch cuttings, remove the bottom leaves, and place in a vase holding a few inches of water. Soon you will see roots emerge from the cuttings and, after two to three weeks, you can plant them. There is some complaint that Mexican petunia seeds too freely and may become weedy. I have never found this to be the case but if you are concerned about this possibility, plant Purple Showers, a sterile variety.

Hunt is growing Southern Star Pink, a dwarf Ruellia variety that reaches one foot in height. Blue and white flowered dwarfs are also available. “The stuff breaks really easily,” he writes. “When someone brings a dog over to visit mine, you can see the trails they’ve run through since it snaps off so easily. But it grows back with a vengeance.  Even snapped-off pieces will start to root. In our yard, my wife usually snaps it all off to the ground in March, and in a few months it looks great. But out in the yard, it’s two to three feet tall because she didn’t prune it back this year.” Although promoted as staying one foot tall, the dwarf types may grow taller, especially when the plants in question sprout on site from seeds dropped by mother plants. What grows from a seed is never entirely predictable and often a surprise.

California native of the week: Matthew Hunt also grows and extols Ruellia californica. It’s a shrub with a height and girth, at maturity, of four feet. It is more drought tolerant than the commonly seen species described above. Funnel-shaped flowers of this plant bloom year-round when the soil is given occasional water, although this plant can subsist on winter rain alone. All Ruellias are powerfully magnetic to butterflies and hummingbirds. I checked the native plant nurseries in our area and was unable to locate Ruellia californica. Perhaps it is overlooked since its habitat does not cross the border from Baja California Sur (south) into Baja California Norte (north), the latter being part of the California Floristic Province. In any case, if anyone knows of a local source for Ruellia californica or the closely related and larger-flowered Ruellia peninsularis, please advise.

Please send questions and comments to [email protected].

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​ Orange County Register 

Orange County restaurants shut down by health inspectors (June 27-July 4)

• July 6, 2024

Restaurants and other food vendors ordered to close and allowed to reopen by Orange County health inspectors from June 27 to July 4.

Bagel Me!, 13682 Newport Ave., Tustin

Closed: July 2
Reason: Cockroach infestation
Reopened: July 3

Koko Chicken & B.B.Q, 9732 Garden Grove Blvd., Suite 2, Garden Grove

Closed: July 1
Reason: Cockroach infestation
Reopened: July 3

Round Table Pizza, 25290 Marguerite Parkway, Suite C-D, Mission Viejo

Closed: July 1
Reason: Rodent infestation
Reopened: July 2

Tacos & Co., 6620 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine

Closed: July 1
Reason: None provided
Reopened: July 2

Kitchen at Aliso Viejo Country Club, 33 Santa Barbara Drive, Aliso Viejo

Closed: July 1
Reason: Rodent infestation

Ostioneria Bahia, 144 S. Tustin St., Orange

Closed: June 27
Reason: Cockroach infestation
Reopened: June 27

Updates since last week’s list:

Cho Cu Bakery at 14520 Magnolia St., Suite B, Westminster, which was ordered closed June 26 because of a cockroach infestation, was allowed to reopen June 28.

This list is published weekly with closures since the previous week’s list. Status updates are published in the following week’s list. Source: OC Health Care Agency database.

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​ Orange County Register 

Busy Fourth of July holiday for county animal shelter

• July 6, 2024

The county’s animal shelter has taken in 20 dogs the past couple of days and more are expected to arrive as Independence Day celebrations come to a close.

The loud noises, crowds and more people coming and going over the Fourth of July holiday can cause dogs to be frightened more easily and “look for places to run and hide,” OC Animal Care spokesperson Alexa Pratt said. And that means the holiday is the shelter’s busiest time of year.

Ten dogs were taken into the shelter just on Friday morning.

“When animals don’t have that comfort present around large groups of people or loud noises, they look for it whether that be in your home or out of your home, looking for places to escape,” Pratt said. “A lot of times, unfortunately, this is how the animals get out of the home and get out of the yard.”

If your pet escaped over the holiday, Pratt said call OC Animal Care’s office at 714-935-6848 or try the “lost and found” tab on ocpetinfo.com, OC Animal Care’s website. There, pet owners can check if their lost animal wound up at the county shelter or if it has been found by community members. OC Animal Care serves much of Orange County, but also check which shelter your city contracts with.

Pets that are brought into the shelter are examined by a vet, vaccinated and placed in one of the shelter’s kennels. Lost pets are held for their owners to claim them for four to 10 days, depending on which city they were found in and whether they had any form of identification, according to OC Animal Care’s website.

Pet owners are also encouraged to search through their neighborhood and tap resources such as social media groups, local veterinarians and posting flyers.

The Mission Viejo Animal Shelter, which provides services to several of its neighboring cities, had an “unusually” slow holiday this year, only taking in two stray animals as of Friday afternoon, spokesperson Brynn Lavison said, calling it a “good thing.”

To prepare for the anxiety that comes with loud holidays, Pratt suggests creating a “comfortable corner in the house full of blankets” to calm the animals down. Playing music or white noise in the room can also cancel out some of the loud fireworks sounds.

Additionally, getting your pet microchipped and ensuring the contact information associated with the microchip is updated is the best way to add extra security for your precious pets, Pratt said.

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“When a dog comes into our shelter, the first thing that we do is check for a microchip and if we find one, we can call,” Pratt said. “We try to get the animal and its family reunited as quickly as possible before the dog or cat even comes into the shelter.”

​ Orange County Register 

Two SCOTUS cases show how an unaccountable administrative state hurts ordinary people

• July 6, 2024

After the U.S. Supreme Court curtailed the powers of federal agencies in two cases last week, progressive critics predictably complained that the decisions favored “big business,” “corporate interests” and “the wealthy and powerful.” That gloss overlooked the reality that people with little wealth or power frequently are forced to contend with overweening bureaucrats who invent their own authority and play by their own rules.

In the more consequential case, the court repudiated the Chevron doctrine, which required that judges defer to a federal agency’s “permissible” interpretation of an “ambiguous” statute. The majority said that rule, which the court established in 1984, was unworkable, creating “an eternal fog of uncertainty” about what the law allows or requires, and fundamentally misguided, allowing the executive branch to usurp a judicial function.

Although People for the American Way perceived a win for “the corporate interests that have been itching to gut the power of federal agencies to protect our health and welfare,” the dispute at the center of the case complicates that picture. Two family-owned fishing operations objected to onerous regulatory fees they said had never been authorized by Congress.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted other examples of vulnerable supplicants who suffer when agencies are free to rewrite the laws under which they operate. He cited cases involving a veteran seeking disability benefits and an immigrant fighting to remain in the country.

Because of an arbitrary rule the Department of Veterans Affairs invented for its own convenience, Thomas Buffington lost three years of disability benefits the government owed him. Alfonzo De Niz Robles faced deportation and separation from his American wife and children after the Board of Immigration Appeals overturned a judicial precedent on which he and many other immigrants had relied for relief.

“Sophisticated entities and their lawyers may be able to keep pace with rule changes affecting their rights and responsibilities,” Gorsuch noted. They can lobby for “reasonable” agency interpretations and “even capture the agencies that issue them.”

By contrast, Gorsuch added, “ordinary people can do none of those things. They are the ones who suffer the worst kind of regulatory whiplash” when the law changes according to bureaucratic whims.

In another case, the court ruled that the Seventh Amendment requires jury trials for people accused of securities fraud. The majority said the Securities and Exchange Commission had violated that right by imposing civil penalties via internal proceedings in which the agency itself served as investigator, prosecutor and judge, with only minimal independent review after the fact.

The petitioner in that case was a hedge fund manager accused of lying to clients and inflating his fees. The progressive outlet Common Dreams decried a “victory for the wealthy and powerful.” But the SEC’s rigged process, in which the agency almost always prevailed, also affected people of modest means facing more dubious allegations.

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Consider accountant Michelle Cochran, a single mother of two who was hit with a $22,500 fine and a five-year ban on practicing before the SEC after in-house proceedings in which she represented herself. When the agency investigated her former employer, it concluded that she had “failed to complete auditing checklists,” leaving some sections blank, although there was “no evidence” that the incomplete paperwork had caused “monetary harm to clients or investors.”

The SEC, Gorsuch noted, sought to “penalize citizens without a jury, without an independent judge, and under procedures foreign to our courts.” That approach, he said, violated constitutional constraints that “ensure even the least popular among us has an independent judge and a jury of his peers resolve his case under procedures designed to ensure a fair trial in a fair forum.”

Defenders of the administrative state seem to assume that federal agencies inerrantly target greedy villains who bilk the unwary, undermine public safety or threaten the environment. But “while incursions on old rights may begin in cases against the unpopular,” Gorsuch observed, “they rarely end there.”

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @jacobsullum.

​ Orange County Register 

Murder by suicide: Linda Cummings’ brother asks for ‘small act of decency’

• July 6, 2024

Paul Broadway credits Linda Cummings, his older half-sister, with making him a kind, loving and responsible adult. We stayed in touch after he wrote me a sweet thank you card after I wrote a series in The Register in 2005 about her case.

Editor’s note

Former Orange County Register reporter Larry Welborn covered Linda Cummings’ story from 1974 until his retirement in 2014 and still pursued the truth in the following years. He wrote about it in the new book “Murder by Suicide: A reporter unravels a true case of rape, betrayal and lies,” which is available on Amazon. This is part six of a seven-part series.

Part one: 50 years ago, Linda Cummings died and the pursuit of the truth started

Part two: Search for evidence leads to more heartbreak

Part three: After 31 years, an arrest is made

Part four: Judge’s ruling a ‘gut-punch’

Part five: Serial killer and a book raise questions

Part seven: Coming Sunday

In late 2019, I phoned Paul to ask if her misleading death certificate bothered him as much as it bothered me.

“Hell, yeah, it does!”

At my suggestion, Paul contacted Irvine attorney Michael L. Fell, Orange County’s foremost legal expert on victims’ rights. Mike spent 18 years as a prosecutor before starting his own criminal defense firm in 2009.

He is also a rarity in the defense bar because he will not take on cases of would-be clients accused of violent crimes against others, no matter how much they offer to pay.

Fell was perfect to help Paul Broadway restore his sister’s legacy.

“I’ll help you in any way I can,” Fell vowed when we all met in his office.

Fell harvested my “murder book” for documentation and support in preparing his arguments. He noted that Stevens told detectives during a 2006 interview that he would reclassify the death certificate to homicide on the “slightest (new) evidence” that Linda Cummings was murdered.

Well, together, we identified 17 reasons why he had no doubt Linda was murdered, each reason sufficient on its own to satisfy the “slightest evidence” threshold.

“The current determination of ‘undetermined’ is a vague word written by an indecisive man and it clearly does not define or do justice to what really happened … in Apartment 8 of The Aladdin,” Fell wrote in a letter to Dr. Anthony Juguilon, the chief forensic pathologist of Orange County.

The letter appealing for an official reclassification of Linda’s cause of death to “homicide” was dated Jan. 31, 2020 – almost to the day 46 years after Linda Cummings was found dead.

The heart of Fell’s formal request was provided in a letter from Paul attached to the lawyerly appeal:

“My sister Linda did nothing to deserve the way her life ended in that dingy apartment on 17th Street in Santa Ana,” Paul wrote.

“She does not deserve to have her legacy denigrated by the false narrative of being officially accused of taking her own life on her death certificate. She deserves to have the record corrected to have the real cause of death.”

He called such an official change a “small act of decency” that must be done “because she was robbed of everything else.”

“Linda was a loving and caring person. She was loved by her friends, family and workmates. She was young, attractive, and she had a bright future ahead of her. The future was a shared future with our family.”

But “that future was cut short,” he said in his letter, “by a monster who took her dignity and life” and then spread the Big Lie that she took her own life.

“She was raped, hung nude and then misrepresented by a monster who had no empathy or appreciation for how good she was.

“She will never have any children to love as she loved me. She will never find her great love and get married. She will never live up to the great things that she was striving for. She deserves so much better.

“The line on her death certificate (stamped) ‘undetermined’ is a personal affront.”

He concluded: “Please give Linda the decency of having the correct cause of death on her death certificate, and not the false and demeaning determination that was engineered by her killer.”

•••

The COVID-19 pandemic closed or slowed government operations for the next few months, leaving us in suspense about how a review committee would respond. It appeared there was no precedent anywhere in the region for changing a death certificate that had been issued nearly a half-century earlier.

But then in April 2020, Jugilon convened a panel of vested detectives and prosecutors.

A sheriff’s official described the stark facts: a naked young woman, hanging in a noose with a non-slip knot behind her neck and tied off on opposite sides of the room. Senior Deputy District Attorney Steve McGreevy, the head of the homicide prosecution unit, noted that the coroner’s investigator in 1974 had relied on misinformation provided by the killer that the victim had been suicidal and was treated for mental problems – all of it part of an elaborate lie.

Dr. Juguilon called the evidence overwhelming. Linda Cummings was a homicide victim, he said, and her death certificate would be changed to so reflect.

“We righted a wrong,” he told me when I interviewed him later, underscoring that the revision was an easy call. “I hope this brings Linda’s family some peace, because I know it’s been haunting them for a while.”

I was with Mike Fell in his Irvine law office when he called Paul to break the news “One of the best calls I’ve ever made in my life,” Fell said.

Paul Broadway was elated, calling it “the best thing to happen to this family in 50 years.”

One of the best days in a journalist’s life, too.

Coming Sunday, part seven: A gathering to commemorate some justice for Linda Cummings.

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